Whether or not the world is deterministic, we still live with a single, deterministic history, and we don’t know what history we’ll be in until we already have lived it. We also live the computation of events as they happen. We don’t get to choose where we end up, but we also can’t know where we will end up because we are the computation happening that creates the single, fixed past we know about.
Demotivation about determinism happens because you thought you had a choice and now you’re bummed that you don’t. But if you realize that you never had a choice, you can’t be demotivated because that’s just how things are and demotivation requires some gap between expectation and reality.
Feeling a lost sense of purpose or motivation is normal upon realizing that we can’t control the past, don’t know the future, and can’t know in full how we come to live in that fixed history. It’s also a phase you have to go through, and out the other side is acceptance that the world works as it does because you had already been living it, and the demotivation will evaporate because the disappointment at not having free will goes away.
Here’s how I think about it.
Whether or not the world is deterministic, we still live with a single, deterministic history, and we don’t know what history we’ll be in until we already have lived it. We also live the computation of events as they happen. We don’t get to choose where we end up, but we also can’t know where we will end up because we are the computation happening that creates the single, fixed past we know about.
Demotivation about determinism happens because you thought you had a choice and now you’re bummed that you don’t. But if you realize that you never had a choice, you can’t be demotivated because that’s just how things are and demotivation requires some gap between expectation and reality.
Feeling a lost sense of purpose or motivation is normal upon realizing that we can’t control the past, don’t know the future, and can’t know in full how we come to live in that fixed history. It’s also a phase you have to go through, and out the other side is acceptance that the world works as it does because you had already been living it, and the demotivation will evaporate because the disappointment at not having free will goes away.
Why?
Has the past ever once changed to the best of your knowledge?
That doesn’t show that the future will be deterministic, or that the past came about deterministcally.
Yep, exactly, I said the past is deterministic, the future is uncertain.